Cledara Raises $3.4m Seed - A Note From Cristina Vila, Founder & CEO @ Cledara

Dear Friends of Cledara,

I’m excited to announce that Cledara has closed a Seed Round of $3.4 million led by Nauta Capital, with participation from Anthemis, our existing investors. It’s an exciting time to welcome Jordi, Borja and Xevi from Nauta to the Cledara family as we look to take our next steps towards making the power of SaaS more accessible to businesses all around the world.

Today, Cledara is less than 2.5 years old, but we already help companies in 12 countries bring visibility and control to their SaaS. It’s an achievement that I’m extremely proud of, and one that we couldn’t have done without the extraordinary team that have each brought their own energy, insight and passion to Cledara. And we’re just getting started.

I’ve seen the power and the challenge of SaaS first hand while building businesses before. SaaS is amazing. Businesses of any size can get access to the most powerful software in the world, in seconds, using only a credit card. Every person in a company has become their own procurement department, bringing massive increases to productivity, employee happiness and innovation.

But like all powerful things, SaaS too brings challenges. It’s very accessibility means that companies are typically using 50-100 different software tools, without any systems or processes to manage it. Now everyone is their own procurement department, companies have no visibility or control over the SaaS they use and as a result more than $30 billion will be wasted on forgotten, unused and duplicate SaaS in 2020. And if tech companies find it hard, traditional businesses will face an even bigger challenge as they begin to adopt SaaS. Cledara’s mission is more important now than ever.

This round comes at an inflection point for Cledara. We have grown more than 20x in 2020 as more companies have learned how to bring visibility and control to their SaaS and, in doing so, scale faster, protect customer data and save money. That level of growth means we’re now hiring across all areas of our business and plan to 4x the size of the Cledara team in the next few months. If you’re looking for your next move and are excited about building the SaaS operating system for companies in the cloud, do reach out!

Those that join us will be joining a team that have built and scaled fintech businesses before and will be supported by some of the world’s best investors. Our investors rank among the most successful investors in fintech and beyond and have backed companies like Deliveroo, Sendgrid, PillPack, ClassPass, eToro, Pipe and Truelayer.

In this round, they are joined by Nauta Capital. Through their offices in London, Barcelona and Munich, Nauta’s team of 24 people makes it one of Europe’s largest B2B-focused VCs. Their specialisation in B2B SaaS means they’re very well placed to complement the existing fintech expertise we have both in the team and on the cap table from the likes of Anthemis, Techstars and super angel Chris Adelsbach.

We first met Nauta at SaaStock in 2019. Having won SaaStock’s Best SaaS Startup prize in 2018, we returned in 2019 to pass on the award. At a pre-conference event at Zendesk’s Dublin office, we just happened to take a seat near Guillem Sague, Nauta’s Munich-based partner. A few days later, Guillem introduced us to Borja and more of the team. And the rest is, as they say, history. Serendipity really can be a wonderful thing.

So, watch this space. We’re coming for your SaaS!

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Cristina Vila
CEO and Founder
Cledara

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